 Have you ever wondered what is the best open-source limiter plugin out there? Today we are about to find out Hey, I'm Anfa. I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer However, I only use open-source software and Linux and At this video, I'm going to do a shootout of open-source limiter plugins if you've seen my x42 If you have seen my x42 DPL video, this is like a continuation to that one if you haven't seen it Go check it out there. Okay. Let's get started Here is my test setup and the top left corner We're gonna have the user interface of the plugin being tested on On the bottom of the screen, there's a oscilloscope that will let us evaluate the differences between the original waveform and the processed waveform of our sound in the top Right corner. We have a spectrograph and a spectrum analyzer that will help us Identify any harmonic distortion that may be occurring. I'm going to turn on my test sound which is a Synthesized kick drum. I've used Geon kick, which is a fantastic open-source Drum synthesizer plugin. I'm going to be testing every plugin on its default settings first You can see that we have a little bit of gain reduction and that's because the default threshold is negative one decibel So let's see how far we can push this plugin before it starts distorting All right, I don't see any difference in the spectrum. Let's bypass this plugin and see Yeah, it's just all quieter. There are no extra harmonics or anything like that But we can still reduce the release time It's 10 milliseconds. Let's go down Okay, one millisecond. That's the minimum Okay, I Don't see any harmonic distortion, but we can still make the release time shorter. Let's go down. All right. Nothing. This looks Perfectly clean still and it sounds perfectly clean as well Yeah, well, we can also push extra input gain. Let's do that 10 decibels 20 30 it still sounds perfectly clean what what's going on? All right There's also one setting we can swap between sample peak and true peak detection. Let's enable Inter sample peak Okay, that doesn't seem to do much, but there is a tiny little difference in the waveform You can see the red waveform Tiny bit smaller on the high frequencies if we zoom right in Actually zoom right in not zoom right out increase the hold This is our the start of our kick If I bypass That's what we get if I unbi pass. Okay, so threshold is one and put again is zero This is the default I will lower threshold Just stays clean It's crazy. It doesn't distort doesn't crush anything. It's just it's awesome. I love it and X42 DPL, which is what we're testing right now is my go-to limiter at the time of filming this because it just Just great. It's clean. It's simple. I love it. All right, let's Check out the next one, which is LSP side chain. Oh, it's a side chain limiter. No, no, no don't LSP limiter mono There's also a stereo version they they are exactly the same pretty much. Let's just let it go Okay, so on default settings it already does some limiting and we can see it's I Feel like the sound is a little bit more high frequency intense Let me zoom out and we'll see what's going on Okay, so we have quite a lot of limiting by default and As you can see the green Haven't said that but the green waveform is the original the right red waveform is The process signal and when they overlap perfectly it's yellow So you can see that the start of the sound isn't untouched, but then we have some limiting on the bass tail that's why It sounds to me like the overall sound is more High frequency heavy Yeah, and if I bypass it you can see that the high frequency the low frequencies are picking higher Let me now unbibe as it We definitely have a few decibels less of the bass Okay, so these are the default settings. What can we do to like give it Less of a release maybe here Great, this doesn't seem to do anything maybe this auto or Something thing will help if I'm lowering this Okay, yeah, that's but now I can hear some distortion Can you see we have extra high frequency content in here? It's very subtle, but You can see we have like tiny little Waves in here that are not present in the original signal There's definitely some distortion you can see that the waveform is out of shape All right, maybe we can enable over sampling. Let's go. I don't know what why half and oh Oh, that makes it worse Okay, it's way more distorted now What if I make the release higher? Okay, that doesn't do anything and this All right, but still I can't get my tail to be as loud as I want Maybe I've lowered the threshold. Let's see what happens. Oh, we've got some nasty Really nasty stuff happening very random as well. It has automatic boost. All right What if we disable this ALR thing? Oh That's no good. Okay, what the what's going on? What if I disable over sampling? Okay, no full over sampling Okay, I don't really want my limiter to do this, you know What what is going on? Okay, that's Look ahead five milliseconds You can see that it's properly reporting the The look ahead delay in here Artor gets this value and compensates as why our waveforms are in line They're overlapping so there's a tiny difference. So maybe it's not reporting. It's look ahead delay Perfectly accurately like there's a tiny bit of misalignment between these waveforms Okay, I I I'm afraid getting this the same clean result I got from DPL from x42 DPL is gonna take me a lot of time Or maybe it's even possible. I don't know There's also dithering Can insert can insert extra noise To limit the no the dynamic range Interesting. All righty, so that's Lsp limiter mono it has a lot of settings But I wasn't able to get as clean and as easy to use results as in x42 DPL And I had some weird base attenuation By default, which I couldn't really get rid of Just a note There is an extensive manual for all the lsp plugins. So probably if I read up All of that I would be able to Get decent results But do I really want to spend this much time when I can just use x42 DPL Not really. All right. So the next plugin in our shootout is calf limiter Let's go. Oh What why are the waveforms misaligned? How we have five milliseconds of look ahead Latency, but we have no latency being reported to our door What if I turn it down? All right. Okay, that that explains it. So Right off the bat. This plugin does not report its latency to the host, which is not great because that means The latency compensation of our door, which is a fantastic feature is not gonna work unless you manually specify it here I want to have Okay, I don't know how many samples. Okay, I could just try and eyeball it. Okay, I eyeballed it 250 234 samples seem to be Five milliseconds. Great, but that's not convenience to do it manually All right. Now we have aligned waveforms. We can compare them better. So by default this Limiter does not introduce any gain or any limiting And we can go down with that Oh, we have a gain. Whoa, whoa, whoa What's going on? Okay, no, there's auto level. What if I disable that? Okay, all right And that looks pretty good. That looks clean. Let's go auto level Okay, so now we're trying to reach zero decibels However Okay, I can hear Is that some distortion? I don't see any distortion on the waveform to be fair I think the only distortion I'm hearing is this little tiny Sharp angle that is just being Exaggerated by Of the game we're getting from this limiter. Let me double click and Disable that. Okay. What what if we push it hard? Because now it looks good. I don't see any distortion If I bypass it and unbi-pass it I don't see any change in the shape of our frequency response, which is great That's what I want from my limiter. If I want something else, I use a clipper or a saturator. Whatever From limiter, I want clean sound However, I think we get some of overshoot as you can see the Output is a bit higher than Input I'm not entirely sure and Do we have some we're getting some clipping? I don't know There's something called ASC. It's probably similar to what LSP had which is like automatic Alteration of the release time. Oh, yeah, if I disable that it starts to Churn on the bass Okay, and I can manually make the release longer, but well, you know half a second to get a clean bass is way too much Kind of get this to distort badly I guess look ahead also Makes the attack shorter Yeah, exactly So you can actually use this limiter as a clipper if you really want Not passable with x4u dpl. So if you need this kind of thing, it's great Though okay with the ASC. Also, there is this little knob. I don't know what it does Okay, I I'm not sure You know, I am not sure if we're not getting a little bit of harmonic distortion and actually we must be because look at this Okay, I have to make this release longer if you remember With the x42 dpl. We could have released at one millisecond and still have perfectly clean bass But not with calve limiter But it can do clean it can do a clean sound you just need a longer release and make sure the ASC whatever it is is on What about the over sampling? All right. Okay. I see it turning down the The waveform on the high frequency content. Let's zoom in A little bit so we can get a better view Oh and our time misalignment is really Better this can I Okay, I need to twiddle twiddle this thing. Can I just changes by one sample at the time? 33 35 Okay 36 all righty 236 is Perfect 4.95. Okay, never mind. We're all we have an overlap That's good. Let's see what happens if I start over sampling Oh It increases the delay Oh, that's weird That is very strange But we are getting lower peaks. So I mean, that's good That's that's weird. Maybe maybe all the plugins have extra latency when you enable over sampling But they report that to the host so it's corrected automatically and here I just need to correct that manually By the way, you can see that We have like perfect analog representation of the signal because There is um There is way less samples in this audio signal than there are pixels on the screen Okay, so that's calf limiter. It's uh, it can't be decent not gonna lie. It can do it can do nice All right. Now it's time for fast look ahead limiter Which is a very simple plugin that I've been using a lot in my lmms days Because it's easy. It does the job and it's available in the latz format Which was the only thing that lmms really supported. I believe it was even bundled with it. Let's listen to how it sounds All right, so Just adjust hold time Right off the bat. We can see that the plugin reports its latency correctly And I believe that's five milliseconds. I've read it on I have read that on the plugins manual page some a few years back So by default we have no change whatsoever because the limit is at zero decibels and my sound is not going above that and the release time of half a second, which is Very long. I'm going to lower this See what happens All right, we have clean limiting going on. That's nice We have gain reduction metering as well There's also input gain control. Let's see what it does Okay, it works We still have a clean output. I'm not sure if we're not clipping a little bit though And you can hear that the control are not Interpolated there is zippernoids when I move this But well, you're not really supposed to automate your limiter input gain. I think I mean you could But uh, yeah, not a deal breaker by any means I'm gonna reset that I can shift click Let's see what happens if I lower the release time so maybe give it some input gain and then Limit it to negative four decibels. So we have like Very comparable levels on the bass tail and now it's lower the release and see what happens Oh, I can hear some distortion whoa all right I think there is a little bit of crunching going on So I think mostly it's this little thingy here that is being emphasized I don't see a lot of waveform distortion though Yeah, I think it's pretty clean actually And for this short release time I think it's doing pretty well Alrighty, so that was fast. Look ahead limiter Now let's take a look at mda limiter. Let's hear it ouch. Okay. This is pretty much a Saturator soft clipper at this point. Um, and by default it's pretty harsh Oh, okay. We have threshold at 0.6. Whatever that means I'm gonna turn it up. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay So it's 0.5 No How do I get it to not Oh, all right We don't have Moving it up is what oh, it's really hard to control I can't really have it not do anything We have attack So if I increase the attack it's gonna let through the peaks, which is kind of bad for a limiter It has no look ahead Delays so Yeah Oh, oh, that's bad. I mean, it's awesome if you want distortion Release at zero attack I mean It's a pretty cool character for distortion, but that's not a limiter. I would use to limit something I will use this to distort something Also, we have knee hard and soft. Let's see Oh Now we're talking What if I lower the attack? Okay, we got a little bit of distortion you can see that our Frequency content is gets kind of messy Now I bypassed it now You can see all these Weird shapes like there's some harmonic Distortion going on for sure plus I can hear it All right, but this is already better Yeah I have no idea what are the millisecond values for this This sounds pretty clean But I had to do so much work I get the same results with dpl with x42 dpl in just like two clicks Not worth the time in my opinion All right, so that was mda limiter Now let's listen to tap scaling limiter I've read that this limiter is supposed to detect Zero crossings and scale down Every waveform cycle between zero crossings so it should be Rather clean I guess I have been using a bit in the past again in my lmms days It has just two controls limit level and output volume It has some look ahead delay apparently And that probably is like 15 milliseconds Let's see what happens if I limit the level Oh Oh, that's bad Oh Something is definitely not working as intended I think the zero crossing detection is totally off And that's what what's going on. I don't know I don't remember this plugin sounding like that. So I think it's just broken not sure why And I don't have any other version of it Yikes All right, so we can't really test tap scaling limiter because it's worked Too bad Let's now take a look at z a maxim 2. It's a plugin from zam audio. Let's have a listen Hmm interestingly by default even though our Threshold is at zero decibels. We have some gain reduction. You can see That's kind of strange Even though it doesn't show us any gain reduction. It definitely Does some of that. All right, if I reduce the release time to zero it doesn't Let's go with the defaults. All right. So shift click resets the default Let's lower the threshold and see what happens. Alrighty, that's clean Except for this little click here, which is Of course present in the source signal and it's just exaggerated Let's see if I lower the release Okay Oh, that's interesting. This is quite weird. We have some distortion going on in here. That's not great But well, that's quite extreme also the ceiling Uh, so this is actually the The threshold It's kind of strange It this seems to kind of follow the waveform shape. So maybe I'm Judging it too hard about this All right. So the zam limiter seems to be pretty okay It's a little bit strange And increasing the release time to 24 25 milliseconds seem to be Giving us a cleaner sound overall, but it's doing good. It has a nice clean display I don't see a reason to not use it So again, I think I prefer x42 dpl There's just three plugins left and the first in line of these is z limiter sp It's a plugin bundled with zero of them. I believe let's hear it So that is the default settings Which is nice. It doesn't create anything any change which I like I think a limiter On default settings should be transparent So there's no difference whatsoever. All right Let's lower the threshold and see what happens Okay, that is kind of strange Oh, maybe it's because of the attack. You can see that we have limiting going on, but it's so slow We would totally lose this threshold. Sorry this transient So that's not a limiter in my book What what happens if I go all the way? All right. Yeah, the you can see that the initial peak Is still perfectly Loud like there is no change whatsoever. It's the same volume and it just gets turned down As it goes. What happens if we lower the attack time? Okay, no change Nothing changes That is strange the attack knob doesn't seem to do anything. I will reset it to defaults All right It's limit again Okay, we we still have this whole transient going through unaffected. That's not a limiter in my book And the attack control does absolutely nothing What does the release control do? Can we have something happen with the release? Okay, we can get it to distort Yep Not great Uh, that's not a great limiter. I would say Sorry Oh now the Oh, what the hell? What did just happen? wait, so Does attack and release knobs controls like push and pull the same control just in the opposite directions Oh now the attack control does something wow Let's lower the release Okay No, but now that's not doing anything Oh and now it's just All right, this is this is baffling. I have no idea what this limiter is doing, but I think it's just completely broken at this point So, yeah I don't recommend using this limiter at this point in time Now let's see what happens with it later right. Yo, just two plugins left And this one is called simple limiter in parentheses peak envelope tracking Let's hear it. All right. It's transparent by default. I like that I'm not sure why the threshold is at one or can be higher at four. Okay Let's go to negative Whoa Oh, that's bad Oh Wow That's like the worst possible thing It distorts like crazy It's also Very inconsistent. You see every hit is different and it lets the transients through. All right, we can change this Times it's change the attack to zero Release too longer Okay, but now it doesn't do anything What are the Units of this threshold parameter? Okay, that's still let's the initial transient through we can see Yeah, the the first three cycles of the wafer are Almost unaffected And then it just distorted to shreds Nah, not recommending this this limiter at all. It's way too simple Oh, yeah, that's bad. Oh from this to this I mean, it might be really cool if you want some unstable distortion. Don't get me wrong It's doing some interesting Distortion things. So if you're going for some really distorted stuff Yeah, try Might be great But not for limiting and the last plug-in Is really a joke. It's called hard limiter And it's not a limiter. Let me show you why By default it's transparent fantastic But let me lower the db limit It's a clipper. Yes Yeah, it's it's a it's a nice clipper I mean, it's a simple clipper, but it does the job clips. So if I want to like cut off this little transient here It's gonna do a nice job and I am actually using this plug-in quite a lot When taming drum transients because it gives me quite a lot of control over the clipping and that's because of the residue level It's a clipper, but it gives you some extra options, which is it Let's you specify how much of the processed signal comes through Maybe none at all and how much of the residue comes through which is the signal that you're actually chopping off So Let's limit this Or clip it rather And now if I turn down the wet level to zero but turn up the residue level We are left only With the cutoff peaks, which is really useful for Judging by ear What you're doing to your sound and I often do it that way and then adjust the level To hear them only affecting my peaks and not the tail And when I hear just a click for my kicks, I know I'm just clipping the transients and not the tails And then I can go back And also because we have this residue level we can use it as a dry wet control so we can Move that up And what happens is we get some of our signal back Let's zoom in and see that up close Yeah, so now if I clip it you can see our signal is being clipped And mind you these weird interpolations Are there because we have very little audio samples to work with at these frequencies really And all this rippling is also just a Gibbs effect which happens naturally if you have a band limited digital signal reproduced Or any band limited signal at all So that's not an issue of this plugin So if I now increase the limiting You can see we are nicely clipping this But if I go with the residue you can see I'm getting back some of my signal Of course, we still have sharp corners in here because the knee is perfectly sharp So this is not a saturator. It's not a soft clipper. It's a hard clipper And you can still hear Even with a lot of residue Even at this level I can still hear all the harsh distortion. It's just very very quiet And if I disable the wet You can hear it hear it in all its glory What this also does is it lets you use this as a hard gate So instead of clipping the The peaks off you're clipping the the other stuff you're clipping Everything but peaks Which is also an interesting effect So yes, the hard limiter is not really a limiter But it's an interesting plugin that I have in my toolkit and I use it At times That's all I wanted to show you today. Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something and found this interesting Maybe I've inspired you to clip your sounds or limit them cleanly. Who knows? I would also like to thank all the fine people who are supporting my work financially Thanks to them. I can be doing this instead of other work If you the reviewer would like to join them and help keep this show going Please go to patreon.com slash anfa Or liberapay.com slash anfa or you can support me with a monthly donation Thanks. Also, if you'd like to get some help Get to know a community of people using open-source software for music production Using linux Please join my community chat at chat dot anfa dot xyz This is a self-hosted rocket chat instance Which is similar to slack, but it's you guessed it Open source. There's also a discord server and you can find it in the newcomer info channel There's a link in rocket chat as well. So discord is proprietary. So I'm recommending rocket chat Oh, and if you would like to learn more about the x42 dpl plugin that I've been praising so much in this video Check out the video I made just before this one where I go in depth with this awesome limiter plugin now go And distort the shit out of it